Aircraft

I’m generally biased in favor of anything that flies, but truth be told there have been a few light-sport aircraft that I haven’t enjoyed flying. I felt that those airplanes were so light on the controls that it was rather unsettling. While the Icon A5 looks cool, I was prepared for the worst when I […]

The volunteers that have been hard at work restoring Doc, a Superfortress that was one of eight B-29s named after characters in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, didn’t quite get the airplane flying by AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, as the group had hoped. But Doc’s Friends, the organization that is spearheading the restoration, says […]

Here’s a very cool video of a P-51 Mustang and F-22 Raptor formation flight that lets the viewer scroll around the screen for an unprecedented 360-degree view of the action. From the camera position in the P-51’s rear seat, viewers can use their mouse (or finger if watching on a touchscreen tablet) to look in […]

Reports of close calls with personal quadracopters and other remotely piloted UAVs are on the rise, with the latest scary story coming from the pilot of a SkyLife medevac helicopter in Fresno, California, who says he came “within about 15 feet” of a drone yesterday afternoon before making a sharp turn to avoid a collision. […]

The FAA has finally had enough. After a sharp rise in close encounters this year between remotely piloted UAVs and commercial aircraft, the agency is now warning drone pilots that they face stiff penalties, criminal charges and even prison time for unauthorized flights. The FAA says there have been 650 reports of UAV sightings by […]

It’s a rare airplane that appears on the scene and hangs on, long after production has ended, not as a nod to nostalgia but because the airplane keeps letting pilots (or their bosses) do things they want to do. Be it making money transporting people and packages deep into mountainous terrain, keeping an eye on […]

Burt Rutan, who retired from his company Scaled Composites in 2010 only to announce he is building a new airplane in his garage, provided some details regarding the progress on what he has named the SkiGull. The SkiGull is designed as a multi purpose airplane capable of landing on water (it incorporates design details to […]

FlightSafety International is in the process of building a new full flight simulator to train King Air 350 pilots flying behind Rockwell Collins’ new Pro Line Fusion avionics suite. The new Level D FS1000 simulator will be introduced at the FlightSafety Learning Center in Atlanta and is expected to enter service early next year. The […]

While we haven’t seen evidence of the skies being blackened by drones just yet, the FAA says it has now granted more than 1,000 exemption approvals to commercial UAV operators for everything from film production to pipeline patrol to real estate photography. As of today, the agency says it has issued 1,008 Section 333 exemptions, […]

Airbus engineers have quietly received a patent for a 20-passenger hypersonic “ultra-rapid” business jet that would be capable of whisking the well-heeled from San Francisco to Paris in under three hours. The patent claims the ambitious aircraft would significantly reduce its sonic boom to allow flights at supersonic speed over land. Turbojets and a rocket […]